Bad news for those planning to do anything other than look at art this week: Your week is fucked. It’s Armory Week, which for art professionals and lovers alike means a marathon of art-viewing practically guaranteed to hurt your eyes at some point. There’s treatment for these kinds of injuries, but the best advice we can offer is to simply be careful out there.

Even by itself, the Armory Show is overwhelming. With the Armory Show’s booths extending to the vanishing point in both directions of Pier 94, it can leave an unsettling impression of endlessness, where everything starts to look the same. And amidst the vastness of this week’s equally-momentous art events (a three-part Whitney Biennial, and the Armory’s satellites), this weekend could use a break of something more human in scale.

A mobster’s art collection goes on view at a museum in Southern Italy. On display are “18 fakes.” The exhibition’s curator describes the criminal-collector as “a not particularly refined auction-goer.” [Frieze]

You’re not having a bad day—Scot Haney, the weatherman for CBS’s Hartford, is. He ate cat vomit on broadcast TV. [New York Magazine]

20-year-old “artist” Petra Collins has designed a t-shirt for American Apparel with a girl touching her bushy vagina. While menstruating no less. [VICE, of course]

Art funds pool money from investors to purchase works, and industry is deteriorating. “Of the 36 funds that Noah Horowitz, now the director of the Armory Show art fair, lists in the appendix to his 2011 book Art of the Deal,” writes Melanie Gerlis for The Art Newspaper. “Ten had been abandoned by the time it was published and a further seven have since joined them.” [The Art Newspaper]

Artist and former MOCA board member Catherine Opie gives her thoughts on the possible LACMA-MOCA merger. [ArtInfo]

Mat Gleason pulls apart LACMA Director Michael Goven’s statement on the possible merger with MOCA. It’s a great between-the-lines read, but the stuff that’s not so between-the-lines is perhaps most interesting. Gleason points out that Goven is clearly asserting that in this merger, MOCA will be dissolved. [Huff Po]

The Association of Professional Art Advisors (APAA) presents Public/Private: For and Against the Private Collector Museum, moderated by Lindsay Pollock with speakers Sam Keller, Raymond Learsy, Allan Schwartzman and Mary Zlot. Hosted by Phillips de Pury & Company, 450 Park Avenue, New York, 10022. The panel will take place in conjunction with The Armory Show on […]